The seismic shift is on, the rainbow is turning inside out and Ukiah is about to transform itself with a new palette. If that sounds intriguing, it won’t be.

All that will happen is a perceptible but meaningless gradual transformation of all the houses in town. If that sounds astounding, it won’t be.

We’re simply going to stand back and observe all the paintable houses in our city go from a couple of boring colors to a different, slightly less boring color. The new color is light green, and while it isn’t as boring as the old colors, that’s because it hasn’t been painted on every third house in Ukiah. At least not yet.

When it is it’ll be almost as boring as the beiges and grays that have plagued local housing stock for as far back as any of us can remember. In fact, is there a house in Ukiah that isn’t currently painted either beige or gray? A scant few, maybe. I saw a yellow one a few years ago.

Here comes green. Not emerald green, algae green, kelly green, grass green or the vomitose green that coats the exteriors of all the yoga shops and the health food store. Nothing that repulsive.

What is coming is what you already see: Grayish greenish olive greens and sage greens and pale greens and the greens you think are gray when you drive by at anything more than three miles per hour. Boring greens. Soothing, sleepytime pastel greens. One will be “Sominex Dream Green” and put out by Sherwin-Williams.

So here we are as the tide slowly washes away the terminally dull and dreary earth tone tan houses and light brown houses and beige houses. If the future is like the past our never-ending present will become houses of green for the remainder of our days.

Think of it: the beige blahs began in the 1970s and remain ubiquitous to this day. Then came the muted, subtle, understated, quiet elegance of gray, which managed to be a color both warm and cool at the same time, the ultimate in fashionable Ukiah homes starting in the ‘80s. Now greens.

I guess green is bold and exciting compared with beige and gray, but that’s like saying oatmeal is a punchy, assertive flavor compared with milk.

Boom, crash

I wonder why insurance companies, so stingy with the money they extract from unwilling customers, are so oblivious to foreseeable “accidents” that will inevitably, and probably soon, cost them money. Here in Ukiah a costly but preventable crash-boom-bang might be over by the time you read this.

A few potential house-crushers have been developing over years and have now reached the so-called (and literal) tipping point. Go look.

Head up West Standley to where it bends off to the right, and go a couple hundred yards. When you’re about a hundred feet shy of Janix Road stop your car (there’s a No Parking sign on the west side of Standley) and look up at the cliff looming overhead.

Check out the trees hanging from the outcropping, the bare roots hanging and dangling in nothing. Oxygen and hope appear to be all that’s holding the trees up; in other words, air and prayer. The trees are 40 feet high.

If I lived across West Standley in that collection of cottages below street level I’d sleep under my bed tonight, and contact my insurance rep tomorrow. Wouldn’t an insurance company rather spend a few grand addressing those soon-to-be-uprooted-and down-falling trees now, rather than paying hundreds of thousands in damages next month?

Go look. Wear a hardhat.

Parking solutions

I have talked to my share of people about the plans to put 440 (!) parking meters downtown and haven’t found one who thinks it’s a good idea. Of course I haven’t canvassed any city council members yet.

The whole project is designed as a money-maker for the city. No one disputes that. The city has a parking district so it needs money to support its parking district. Ergo, ipso, facto and thus, we need meters.

But what if the city eliminated its parking district? No more expense.

Does anyone think that without a parking district all the parking spaces in Ukiah would sneak off at night and disappear into the hills around Cow Mountain? Would Ukiahans wake up on a Monday morning and be forced to drive out to Redwood Valley where there were still some parking spots, leave their cars and take a shuttle bus back into town?

Politicians and government workers like to strut around and talk about how they’re doing “More with less” as if saving money is a concern held dear. How about this instead: Do less with less.

Chime-time, revisited

Nice to hear the Methodist Church bells ringing again, and I say it sheepishly in light of my criticism, years ago, for the rinky-tinky cassette deck sound of its recorded bells. But for years the chimes were silent, and I missed them.

Now they’re back and in the first few days I was cheered by a ringing rendition of “America the Beautiful.” It has since disappeared from the rotation, and I have to wonder if it got voted out by the Rainbow-Unicorn congregation of Methodists.

I do know that Kumbaya still boldly rings out all across Ukiah’s western shores, many times a week.

Tom Hine lives in Ukiah near the Methodist building where microwave cell tower transmitters were secretly installed in the belfry a few years ago as a money-maker.. Knowing our local Methodists, TWK wonders if they wear tinfoil headgear when reporting for Sunday meetings.